1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to an expense registration system for registering expenses related to a document received by fax (facsimile).
2. Description of the Related Art
In most patent firms or law firms (hereinafter referred to as the firms), expenses incurred in work done for clients may be charged to the clients. In this case, charges are often made in units of matters (cases) requested from the clients. In this case, the matters include, for example, a contract matter related to closing a contract between one company and the other and a lawsuit matter related to a lawsuit in which one company is a plaintiff or a defendant.
The firm makes a charge in units of matters, so that the firm separately manages expenses in units of matters. In this case, the expenses include, for example, personnel expenses incurred in work, the cost of paper consumed by copying or printing, communication costs for fax transmission and reception, and others.
In managing the expenses in units of matters, a problem is caused in that it is laborious to register expenses related to fax reception in particular. Until now, in registering expenses related to fax reception, a user has needed to calculate a reception cost from the number of pages of the received fax documents, identify that the received fax documents relate to which matter, and calculate personnel expenses required for these works.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2008-160531 discusses a system for notifying a user of reception a fax document. Automatically filing a document received by fax and registering the document on a document management server have also been known. However, a method for reducing labor for registering expenses related to fax reception has not been known, which still requires the user to do laborious work for registering expenses related to fax reception.